What projects can PHP do?

PHP focuses on server-side scripting, so you can do everything other CGI programs can do, such as data collection, generating dynamic page content, or sending and receiving cookies. But PHP can do more things.

Use three main areas of PHP scripting.

Server-side scripts. This is the most traditional and the most important target area of PHP. You need three things to do the work. PHP parser (CGI or server module), a Web server and a Web browser. You need to run the WEB server to a connected PHP installation. You can use a Web browser to access the PHP program output and view the PHP page from the server. All of this can be run on your local machine if you just experience PHP programming. Please refer to the Installation Instructions section for more information.
command-line scripting. You can run PHP scripts without any server or browser. You just need a PHP parser to use in this way. This is the ideal usage for regular script extensions when using cron (in Unix or Linux) or Task Scheduler (in Windows). These scripts can also be used in simple word processing tasks. For more information, please refer to: [Command line usage of PHP].
Writing desktop applications. PHP is probably not the best programming language to create a desktop application with a graphical user interface, but if you know PHP well and are willing to use some advanced PHP features in your client application, you can also use PHP-GTK to write such a program. You also have the ability to write cross-platform applications in this way. PHP-GTK is a PHP extension and is not included in the main release. If you are interested in PHP-GTK, you can visit its own website.
PHP can be used in all major operating systems, including Linux, many different Unix (including Hp-ux,solaris and OpenBSD), Microsoft Windows, Mac os x,risc os, and more. PHP now supports most WEB servers as well. This includes Apache, Microsoft Internet Information Server, Personal Web server, Netscape and iPlanet server, oreilly websita Pro Server, Caudium, xitami,omnihttpd and so on. Mainstream servers provide PHP services in one module, while others support the CGI standard, which PHP can work as a CGI processor.

By using PHP, you will have the freedom to choose your operating system and WEB server. In addition, you can also choose to use process programming or object-oriented programming, or a mixture of them. While not every standard OOP feature is implemented in PHP 4, most code libraries and large applications, including the PEAR library, are written using OOP code. PHP 5 makes up for the weaknesses associated with OOP in PHP 4, and introduces a complete object model.

Using PHP you are not limited to outputting HTML. PHP's capabilities include output images, PDF files, and even Flash videos that are generated by agile (using libswf and Ming). You can also export any simple text, such as XHTML and any other XML file. PHP can automatically generate these files and save them in the file system instead of their printouts, creating a server-side cache for your dynamic content.

One of the strongest and most important features of PHP is that it provides extensive database support. Writing a Web page with database support enabled is so simple. The following list is the currently supported database:

Adabas D
DBase
Empress
Filepro (Read only)
Hyperwave
IBM DB2
Informix
Ingres
InterBase
Frontbase
MSQL
Direct Ms-sql
Mysql
Odbc
Oracle (OCI7 and OCI8)
Ovrimos
PostgreSQL
Sqlite
Solid
Sybase
Velocis
Unix dbm
We also have a database abstraction extension (named PDO) that allows you to transparently use any supported database through that extension. In addition, PHP supports the ODBC (Open database Connection standard), so you can connect to any other database that supports this world-class standard.

PHP also supports conversations with other services that use LDAP, IMAP, SNMP, NNTP, POP3, HTTP, COM (in Windows). You can also open the original network socket and interact with it using any other protocol. PHP also supports complex WDDX data interactions across all WEB programming language visualizations. In a conversation with an interactive connection, PHP also supports examples of Java objects and transparently uses them as PHP objects. You can also use our CORBA extension to access remote objects.

PHP has very useful word-processing features, using POSIX Extended or Perl regular expressions to parse XML files. For parsing and accessing XML documents, PHP 4 also supports SAX and DOM standards, and you can also use the SXLT extension to transform XML documents. PHP 5 standardizes All XML extensions for the LIBXML2 Entity Foundation and adds SimpleXML and XMLReader support to the extended feature set.

Last but not least, we also have many other interesting extensions, Mnogosearch search engine features, IRC Gateway features, many compression utilities (gzip, bz2,zip), calendar conversion, translation ...

The same as what you see on this page is the incomplete list of features and benefits provided by PHP. Read about the installation section of PHP and see the functional reference sections mentioned in the various extensions.